Free The Dreyfus Affair by Piers Paul Read Page B

as were the judges who would acquit Esterhazy. The time had come, Zola judged, to be done with the sniping in the press and lob a mortar bomb into the debate. He would write an open letter to the President of the Republic, Félix Faure, naming names. Ravary and Pellieux were puppets: he would charge the puppet-masters who were conspiring to protect a traitor and let an innocent man rot on Devil’s Island.
    It was a dangerous venture. The press in Paris was partisan and unruly, but there were laws against defamation that were enforced: Morès had been imprisoned for libel and Zola had no proof to back up what he said. He might be France’s best-selling author with an international reputation but that did not mean that he was immune from prosecution. Zola knew the risks he ran; indeed he compounded those risks by writing in a deliberately provocative and intemperate style. Scheurer-Kestner, Picquart, Leblois and Demange had tried a soft approach and it had made no impression on public opinion whatsoever. Zola knew his audience; they wanted heroes and villains, not a nuanced analysis of legal procedures. 8
    â€˜ Monsieur le Président ,’ Zola began,
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    Permit me, as a gesture of gratitude for the kind welcome you once extended to me, to express my concern for your well-deserved glory, and to tell you that your star, so happy until now, is threatened by the most shameful and the most ineradicable of stains . . . This stain of mud on your name – I was going to say on your reign – is this abominable Dreyfus Affair! A Court Martial is about to dare to acquit, under orders, an Esterhazy, flying in the face of all truth and justice . . . and history will state that it was under your presidency that such a crime was committed. Because they have dared, I will dare too. I will speak the truth because I have promised to speak the truth if justice . . . is not done in its entirety. My duty is to speak, I do not want to be complicit. My nights would be haunted by the spectre of an innocent man who is dying out there, from the most atrocious tortures, for a crime he did not commit.
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    Zola then outlined his understanding of what had occurred. He named as the chief conspirator un homme néfaste – an ill-omened man – Commandant du Paty de Clam. It was he who took advantage of the ‘mediocre intelligence’ of the Minister of War, General Mercier, of the Chief of the General Staff, General de Boisdeffre, ‘who appears to have given in to his religious bigotry’, and of the Deputy Chief of the General Staff, General Gonse, ‘whose conscience seems to adapt to a number of things’.
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    But in the final analysis it was Commandant du Paty de Clam who first led them all on, who hypnotised them because he was involved in spiritualism, occultism, he converses with spirits. One cannot conceive of the ordeal he put the unfortunate Dreyfus through, the traps into which he hoped he would fall, the mad inquiries, the monstrous fantasies . . . 9
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    Having established the flimsiness of the case against Dreyfus, Zola outlined the cast-iron case against Esterhazy – his name on the petit bleu , his handwriting not similar to that of the bordereau but identical. Since ‘a conviction of Esterhazy would inevitably lead to a retrial of Dreyfus’, du Paty de Clam and the General Staff had moved to protect him. There had been a moment when the Minister of War, General Billot, seeing the evidence against Esterhazy, might have intervened. ‘He hesitated for a brief moment between his conscience and what he believed to be in the interest of the Army.’ He chose the army and from that moment ‘he became as guilty as the others’. ‘Can you grasp this?’ Zola asks the President. ‘For the last year, General Billot, Generals Gonse and de Boisdeffre, have known that Dreyfus is innocent, and they have kept this terrible thing to themselves. And